After long studies he decided at thirty that painting was his vocation. In 1896 he left Russia for Munich, and opened a school of painting there in 1902. After travelling widely in Tunisia, Holland and Italy he went to Paris in 1906, and there underwent an Impressionist and Fauvist period. From 1908 Kandinsky resided in Munich and Murnau and was co-founder of the Munich Neue Kunstlervereinigung whose aim was to synthesise interior and exterior reality. At this time the artist was passing through his Fauvist period: Houses in Munich (1908), Street in Murnau (1908), On the Outskirts of the Town (1908), Arab Cemetery (1909) and The Cow (1910). His first abstract watercolour dates from 1910. He also wrote The Art of Spiritual Harmony, a major work on abstract painting. He associated with Macke, Klee and Marc, and with the latter was responsible for the Blaue Reiter, the title adopted by the avant-garde group whose exhibition in Munich constituted, in Germany at least, a revolution in modern art. Returning to Moscow in 1914
Kandinsky became professor at the Academy. He emigrated from Russia in 1921 for ideological reasons and taught at the Weimar Bauhaus. During 1910-1919 his work was abstract, lyrical and increasingly geometrical. Fleeing the Nazi regime in 1933 he settled in Paris. His genial personality and outstanding artistic vision contributed powerfully to the advent of abstract art.

Post-Impressionism, Michel-Claude Jalard, Edito Service SA, Geneva